Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (21 page)

As the negotiations with Garfield reached crisis point, Selznick’s office was woefully aware of their deplorable position. In a five-page telegram to Selznick, her business manager Irving Schneider told her, “To lose him now means loss of prestige, difficult position with Music Box, bookings, Guild, and theater parties. To overcome these need replace him with name of similar caliber. The show can survive and come through without him but the immediate and near future effects are severely damning. If none of the above plans work . . . then must bring in Tennessee, Lieblings, Kazan to make the vital decision of whether to forego Garfield and face the consequences. Among those consequences incidentally is finding another good Stanley. We must close our eyes for the moment to the insult and injuries and reversals, avoid rehashing, take a deep breath, kiss the mezuzah and plunge.” Schneider added, “
Gevalt
seems too tame.”

In the end, Garfield came up with yet another demand: if for any reason Kazan were to leave the show, he too would leave. “The Kazan clause” broke the camel’s back. On August 18, the deal collapsed. Selznick, feeling “low as a snake,” immediately starting turning over other Hollywood options. Richard Conte, Dane Clark, Cameron Mitchell, Gregory Peck, and Burt Lancaster were mooted. Signing “Pollyanna,” she wired Schneider:

I HAVE GARFIELD-ITIS IN CHEST AND THROAT. OIVAY

Then, on August 29, a name that didn’t appear on any of her extensive casting lists was being wired to Selznick at her Summit Avenue home in Beverly Hills: Marlon Brando.

Brando, who was twenty-three years old, had appeared without much critical attention in five Broadway plays. He was a beautiful, brooding specimen: mercurial, rebellious, and rampant. Like Stanley, he was a ruthless man-child with reservoirs of tenderness and violence. A year before on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s
Truckline Café
, which Kazan co-produced and Harold Clurman directed, Brando stopped the show with a five-minute “murder monologue.” After his speech, the audience applauded for a full minute. “A minute on the stage is a long, long time,” Clurman, who had “never seen anything like it,” said. He added, “I don’t think he ever did anything better”—a judgment that could hardly be contradicted since
Truckline Café
lasted only thirteen performances. Nonetheless, another witness to Brando’s memorable ferocious psychic explosion, the critic Pauline Kael, thought to herself, “That boy’s having a convulsion! Then I realized he was acting.” Brando wasn’t trying to act, at least not in the hidebound acting tradition hitherto practiced on the American stage. “There was nothing you could do with Brando that touched what he could do with himself,” Kazan said. “In those days he was a genius. His own preparation for a scene, his own personality, armament, memories and desires were so deep that there was very little you had to do, except tell him what the scene was about.”

Brando’s acting style was the performing equivalent of jazz. The notes were there, but Brando played them in a way that was uniquely personal to him. In his ability to call out of dialogue a heightened sense of emotional truth, the freedom of his stage behavior was mesmerizing and revolutionary. Instead of making everything learned and clear, Brando let the lines play on him and rode his emotions wherever they led him. “He even listened experientially,” Kazan said. “It’s as if you were playing on something. He didn’t look at you, and he hardly acknowledged what you were saying. He was tuned in to you without listening to you intellectually or mentally. It was a mysterious process. . . . There was always an element of surprise in what he did.” By turns charming, witty, wounded, cruel—Brando presented the public with an immediacy that seemed un-worked out; his reliance on impulse made him unpredictable and therefore dangerous. For both actor and audience the experience was a submersion in emotional contradiction. “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people,” Williams wrote to Kazan when negotiations with Selznick seemed to have broken down. “Nobody sees anybody
truly
, but all through the flaws of their own ego.” Brando incarnated this ambivalence and made it sensational.

Over the years, as the legend of his performance as Stanley grew from its initial mixed critical response to what the
New York
Times
in his obituary called “epochal,” many theatricals took credit for casting him. Audrey Wood claimed it was her husband William Liebling; with more justification, Kazan maintained it was him; Brando insisted that Harold Clurman planted the idea in Kazan’s head. “Gadg and Irene both said I was probably too young, and she was especially unenthusiastic about me,” Brando recalled in his autobiography. After pondering the script for a few days, even Brando called Kazan to decline the role. The part, he felt, was “a size too large.” “The line was busy,” Brando recalled later. “Had I spoken to him at that moment, I’m certain I wouldn’t have played the role. I decided to let it rest for a while and the next day he called me and said: ‘Well, what is it—yes or no?’ I gulped and said ‘Yes.’ ” To Kazan, Brando was “a shot in the dark”: now only Williams needed convincing. Kazan called Williams, gave Brando twenty dollars, and sent him up to Provincetown to read. “That’s all I said,” Kazan recalled. “I waited. No return call. After three days I called Tennessee and asked him what he’d thought of the actor I’d sent him. ‘What actor?’ he asked. No one had showed up, so I figured I’d lost twenty bucks and began to look elsewhere.”

Brando, who was broke, had decided to hitchhike with his girlfriend to Provincetown. When he finally arrived at Rancho Pancho around dusk in the last week of August, Brando walked into a scene of “domestic cataclysm,” according to Williams. The kitchen floor was flooded, the toilets were blocked, and the light fuse had blown. Like the blackout during the Wingfields’ supper, Williams and his houseguests were plunged “into everlasting darkness.” “It was all too much for Pancho,” Williams said. “He packed up and said he was going back to Eagle Pass. However he changed his mind, as usual.” To Williams, Brando was a spectacle of both beauty—“He was just about the best-looking young man I’ve ever seen”—and prowess. Brando fixed the lights, then unblocked the pipes. “You’d think he had spent his entire antecedent life repairing drains,” Williams said.

An hour later, Brando finally got around to reading. He dismissed his girlfriend and sat in the corner of the clapboard house with Margo Jones, her friend Joanna Albus, and Williams, who cued him as Blanche. According to Williams, Brando read the script aloud “just as he played it.” “I was the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski,” Brando said. “I was sensitive by nature and he was coarse, a man with unerring animal instincts and intuition. . . . He was a compendium of my imagination, based on the lines of the play. I created him from Tennessee’s words.” Letting Williams’s words take him where they would and exuding the freedom of this approach, Brando was only ten minutes into his audition when Jones bolted from her chair with a whoop of delight. “Get Kazan on the phone! This is the greatest reading I’ve ever heard, in or outside of Texas!” she shouted. “A new value came out of Brando’s reading,” Williams wrote to Wood. “He seemed to have already created a dimensional character, of the sort that the war has produced among young veterans.” He added, “Please use all your influence to oppose any move on the part of Irene’s office to reconsider or delay signing the boy, in case she doesn’t take to him.”

On the evening Brando read, after he had kvelled about him over the phone to Kazan, Williams recalled that Brando “smiled a little but didn’t show any particular elation.” Later, after dinner, Williams read some poetry, then they retired for the evening. “Things were so badly arranged that Margo and Brando had to sleep in the same room—on twin cots,” Williams wrote to Audrey Wood on August 29. “I believe they behaved themselves—the fools!” To Williams, Brando was “God-sent.” Brando seemed also to sense the immanence of some big thing. A great actor had met the great writer whose lyric power would release his genius. “When an actor has as good a play under him as
Streetcar
, he doesn’t have to do much,” Brando said. “His job is to get out of the way and let the part play itself.” This powerful alchemy produced in Brando a peculiar shyness when he was around the author. The morning after his audition Brando insisted that Williams walk up the beach with him. “And so we did—in silence,” Williams wrote. “And then we walked back—in silence.”

BUT FOR PANCHO and Williams the rest of the summer was clamorous. The excitement of a new play was enough to exacerbate Pancho’s envy. The arrival into their world of a ravishing powerhouse like Brando, who would make a myth of a petulance that Pancho knew owed its inspiration to him, pushed him over the edge. Even before Pancho tried to run his “Torito” down, Williams sensed trouble brewing. “I am hoping he will go home, at least to New Orleans, until December,” he wrote to Wood at the end of August. “He is not a calm person. In spite of his temperamental difficulties he is very lovable and I have grown to depend on his affection and companionship but he is too capricious and excitable for New York especially when I have a play in rehearsal.” After the car incident, however, Pancho was sent packing—at least for a while. “It took some doing to get Pancho to leave,” Williams recalled. “Probably this phenomenal accomplishment was handled by Irene Selznick who has seldom found herself in a situation with which she couldn’t cope, not even the situation of releasing me from Pancho.”

Williams returned—“quite gratefully so,” he wrote—to Manhattan on September 14 to work on rewrites prior to the beginning of rehearsals at the New Amsterdam Roof on October 6. Although there were over a hundred line changes during the rehearsal period, the most substantive revision was the ending and the final beats after Blanche is carted off to the madhouse. “There is still something too cut-and-dried in the necessary exposition between [Eunice and Stella],” Williams wrote to Selznick on September 8. In the original “Poker Night,” Stanley settles back down to a game of cards; outside, according to the stage directions, in front of the building “dim white against the fading dusk,” Stella rises from the steps and “elevates the child in her arms as if she were offering it to the tenderness of the sky. Then she draws it close to her and bows her head until her face is hidden by the child’s blanket.”

In the final version, rewritten during the painful ructions with Pancho between September and October, Stella’s original isolated gesture of survival is turned into a much more powerful and ambivalent image—a sort of Renaissance pictorial grouping in which Stanley kneels at the feet of Stella, who holds their child on the stairway and sobs as his fingers open her blouse. “Now, now, love,” Stanley coos. “Now, love . . .” The scene demonstrates the couple’s preserving lie. In
Streetcar
, Stanley and Stella collude about Blanche’s rape. For the Kowalski family to continue, Blanche must be sacrificed. In Williams’s story, Pancho also had to be sacrificed so Williams’s life—his work, which was his baby—could go on. The aim of the play, he wrote to Kazan, was “fidelity”—a fidelity as much to his own heart as to his characters. “After this experience, I saw every play and every film I worked on as a confession, veiled or partly exposed, but always its author’s self revelation,” Kazan said. “Probably I would want him back,” Williams wrote to Donald Windham in March 1947, in a typical rationalization. “When we are alone he is usually sweet and amenable.” Williams spun the notion of Pancho into an acceptable fiction. “He needed me as much as I needed him,” Pancho said. “He knew that if we stayed together, we would destroy each other.”

In October, while he was hymning the joys of the rehearsals to Margo Jones—“I cannot find words to tell you how wonderful Jessica and Gadg are, and what a superb combination their talents appear to be”—Williams was confiding loneliness to his notebooks. “Today I am particularly aware of missing Pancho.” He couldn’t be with Pancho, and he couldn’t let him go. “I wish I could write you an equally amusing letter but I don’t have any little nephews to supply me with comic material,” he wrote Pancho in October. “I feel very sober and dull. And when I get home at night, after a day at the disposal of the Selznick company and the Liebling-Wood Corporation, I barely have the strength to hit the typewriter keys. You must try and forgive me for being so stupid and do write me whenever you can. It does me good to hear about your peaceful family life in New Orleans where I would much prefer to be.” Williams ended on a maternal note: “Take care of yourself. Be good, be good, be good! And take your nephews to the zoo.”

Around noon in mid-October, Williams’s writing was interrupted by a fierce pounding at his apartment door. “Reisito, Torito,” the voice outside shouted. Pancho was back. As usual he brought tumult with him. “Unable to break down the door, he jumped onto the cement sills of the gable windows,” Williams wrote in
Memoirs
. “I got to them just in time to lock them. A big crowd had gathered outside the brownstone by this time. Pancho was on the sill, hammering at the window until the glass split. Then a policeman intervened. He did not arrest Pancho but he ordered him away.” Williams went on, “Pancho looked back at me. His face was covered with tears. I started crying, too, a thing I very seldom do.”

The tears spoke both of Williams’s love and of his regret. “I am terribly troubled. I don’t think I am acting kindly, and that is what I hate above all else,” he wrote Margo Jones about “the Mexican Problem.” To separate from Pancho meant losing a lover, a child, a family, and a sense of parental goodness. “He was like a father and brother to me,” Rodriguez said; in fact, on the evidence, Williams was more like a mother, trying to coax Pancho “to take a man’s place in the world.” Edwina Williams’s scolding voice was moralistic, manipulative, martyred; Williams didn’t like it and he didn’t want it around him. He tried to talk Edwina out of coming to the
Streetcar
opening. “This play is hardly your dish,” he wrote her, with the suggestion that she come to
Summer and Smoke
instead the following season. In the end Edwina would not be denied. Williams bowed to her wishes, but he warned her: “I shall not listen to any moral homilies and dissertations so please leave them at home.”